Hotel Giant 2

If you have ever wanted to understand the ins and outs of running a high-end luxury hotel then Hotel Giant 2 might be the game for you. In the same vein of Hotel Tycoon or the upcoming Hotel Magnate, Hotel Giant 2 puts you in control of a manager overseeing a set of scenic and, monumentally different, hotel locations. With meticulously realized detail, you are able to customize everything inside and out ranging from a lowly drive-up motel in the desert to a lavish resort in Paris.

Lap of Luxury

The campaign of Hotel Giant 2 sees you as the manager of a very diverse set of hotels. And, with no real objective other than to raise the rating of each of your locations (all given to you in severe need of repair), you are left with the freedom to design, craft, employ and hopefully populate these hotels as you see fit.

This is where an interest in fine-tuning all the varied menus of the game can help or hurt you in the long run. A detail-oriented player might excel at the extensive options given when creating rooms, gyms, bars, casinos and lobbies—whereas a casual player might be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of customization available.

The Age of Simulation

The game was released over ten years ago before a lot of simulator games like Farming Simulator really hit the mainstream. Where some games like The Sims elected to have a more game-like feel as opposed to realism, Hotel Giant sought to give players the option to really see what it would be like to not only manage a hotel, but design it with profit and longevity in mind. However, in the years since, mainstream ‘sim’ games like Crusader Kings 3 have made great strides in offering similar gameplay depth with a more approachable UI, consequently aging Hotel Giant 2.

Showing Simulated Age

Most of the game centers around how well you can design a fully functioning hotel. In order to design a hotel that meets not only the standards of the rich and famous but your own omnipotent sensibilities, you have to put in a lot of work. When you finally have that moment where your hotel is alive and functioning with little interference from you except housekeeping, it can be a fulfilling experience. However, that’s also where it falls flat. So much of our world now is about sharing our creations and without a multiplayer element there’s no way to let other hoteliers visit your meticulously designed bathtub pyramid adorned by chocolate fountains in the lobby of your desert motel outside of Reno.

Hotel Giant 2 can be a daunting game at first with overwhelming menus and no real direction for objectives unless you search to find them. It also in many ways suffers from its graphical age and dated UI systems. Where the game really shines as an old school simulator, that was perhaps ahead of its time in its attention to meticulous detail, it is still limited by a niche audience and unwillingness to engage new players in that niche.

Pros

• Multiple locations for hotels to manage
• Amazing amount of creative detail
• Rewards meticulous players

Cons

• The game is reserved for a niche audience
• Overly complicated menus making for a cluttered UI
• Old school graphics and animations that haven’t aged stylistically
• Limited objectives for direction and re-playability